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TRUE AND FALSE STANDARDS 
OF GRADUATE WORK 



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! 

ANDREW F. WEST 

DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL 
OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 



Read in Chicago Friday, March 31st, 1905, at the Tenth Annual Meeting 
of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. 



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mercial, technical or other utilitarian influence has 
swept on unchecked into university life without dis- 
aster to university ideals. And no great period of 
intellectual illumination and advance has come to any 
university in all the time of recorded history except 
through the self-sacrificing devotion of men to the 
cause of knowledge as embodied in, or, at least, 
as closely related to the distinctively liberal arts and 
sciences. This has been our guiding light always. 

" And when it fails, fight as we will, we die ; 
And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end." 

A university may have, and a complete univer- 
sity must have, more than this central faculty of arts 
and sciences. The professional and technical schools 
which properly round out the circle, so far from be- 
ing despised as parts of a university, are the great 
appliances which connect the ideal centre of know- 
ledge with the practical needs of the world. A law 
school, a medical school, an engineering school, all 
derive immense benefit by being placed in proper 
relation to the central faculty of arts aud sciences, 
and give back many benefits in turn. But no aggre- 
gation of professional and technical schools makes a 
real university, because such an aggregation lacks its 
vital centre,, its faculty of arts and sciences, which 
alone can maintain the universal standards of know- 
ledge in all their exactness and rigor, and thus relate 
and steady the particular standards of the several 
professional and technical schools. 

The liberal arts and sciences fall into two sec- 
tions. The first or lower section is the undergradu- 
ate college course of study, the one thing in our 
higher education which is best worth preserving, for 
this alone furnishes the best basis, which is always 

G!FT 
MRS. WOOD ROW WILSOM 4 

NOV. 25, 1939 



desired, though not as yet generally taken, for sub- 
sequent university study, whether of liberal or pro- 
fessional character. So I need not argue in this pres- 
ence that to preserve and develop the undergraduate 
college education in its purest form is to do an indis- 
pensable service to all forms of graduate study. 

Let us turn at once to the graduate work and con- 
fine our attention to the other section of the field of 
liberal studies. Professional and technical studies 
may in a sense be depended on to take care of them- 
selves. They will always flourish so long as men are 
seeking to be educated in order to make a profitable 
living. But graduate work in liberal studies cannot 
be maintained on this basis, because the end aimed at 
is different. For if the pursuit of wealth or station 
is the end aimed at by a man who thinks he is giving 
himself to the life of a scholar, he is not aiming at a 
scholarly end. Consequently, in order to maintain 
its own standards, a true graduate school in the lib- 
eral arts and sciences must depend on something else 
to sustain it. The moment it becomes an employ- 
ment bureau or an agency for finding places, a sordid 
motive enters, and it is in danger of ceasing to be 
a school devoted to the cause of truth and knowl- 
edge. Unless, therefore, the life of the scholar is to 
appeal to men not primarily as a means of livelihood, 
but because they cannot help following the scholar's 
life, we have no sufficient basis for justifying the 
maintenance of this all-important school. And if 
this school perishes or becomes degraded, you may 
be very sure that sooner or later every valuable func- 
tion of the university will be injured. 

I suppose we can all accept heartily the state- 
ment that the chief business of a university is to 



maintain standards, — to determine, inspect, and certify 
the intellectual and moral weights and measures. I 
do not doubt Ave can go farther and agree in asserting 
that this maintenance of intellectual and moral stand- 
ards is acutely needed in our own nation at this time 
when its material interests are becoming so vast and 
complex. And this, more than all else, is the pecul- 
iar and pressing duty of every graduate school in 
liberal studies. Here the higher teachers of the na- 
tion are being trained. Here the influences which 
make for truth and reason are or, at least, ought to 
be most pure and uncontaminated. The service to 
be rendered is priceless, the need is urgent, and the 
fact that our graduate schools in liberal studies, pro- 
perly planned and guided, are specially fitted to render 
this service is the fact which justifies their existence. 

It therefore becomes a matter of the first moment 
for us that the standards of graduate work should be 
maintained in as much purity as our means and intel- 
ligence permit. We know they will not be perfect at 
the best, but we also know that if we maintain them 
at a lower level than we ought, even according to our 
own imperfect conceptions of duty, there is nothing 
to keep even our existing standards from deteriorat- 
ing. The duty of self-criticism is therefore ever with 
us, not only if we are to improve, but if we are to 
keep what we have. I therefore ask you to look for 
a little while at three aspects of this question of true 
and false standards in graduate work, — namely, our 
standards of knowledge, our standards of expres- 
sion, and our standards of judgment. 

i. The standards of knowledge in graduate 
work are especially threatened just now by the antag- 
onism of an unenlightened specialization. This is not 

6 



only the curse of the specialization which does not 
rest on a sound general education, but in a degree of 
all specialization which does not limit the subdivision 
of studies by some consideration of the intrinsic value 
of the thing studied. What knowledge is of most 
worth? is the fundamental question which tests 
every graduate study and every graduate student, as 
it does everyone who professes to be a thinker in any 
field of knowledge at any stage of his life. It has 
now become a very fair question whether the subdi- 
vision of topics has not gone so far that not only the 
perception of relative values is clouded, but even the 
community of intellectual interests among our higher 
students is being destroyed. Certainly many of our 
scholars seem to be subjects of some petty principal- 
ity rather than freemen in the commonwealth of 
knowledge. 

It is a matter of common remark that many of 
our rising students in science are only too ignorant 
of literature, many philosophers ignorant of science, 
and many literary men ignorant of both. But this is 
not the full extent of the trouble. Many men, 
whether in science or philosophy or literature or his- 
tory, are unacquainted with and utterly uninterested 
in either science or philosophy or literature or history 
as a whole. We may subdivide still more and find 
that one philosopher is a logician only, one scientific 
man a biologist only, and some other scholar a class- 
ical philologist only. Would that we could stop here. 
But we must go on until we discover that there are 
many who are familiar only with some subdivision of 
a division of their logic or biology or philology. 
They may be known by two characteristics : The first 
is their intensive knowledge of a small portion of 



some subject, which is all very well, and the second 
is their extensive ignorance of everything outside that 
small portion of their subject, which is not well at 
all. How vividly it brings out the point of Mon- 
taigne's satirical story. As he rode across the plain 
one morning, he encountered a company of gentlemen 
and said to them " Good morning, Messieurs," and the 
leader of the company sharply replied " We are not 
Messieurs. My friend here is a grammarian and I am 
a logician." Were these worthy scholars living to- 
day, perhaps they would not be able to profess even 
so much. The one would likely be a student of some 
little part of syntax and the other the exploiter of a 
mechanical device for grinding out some special re- 
sults of the use of the syllogism. This again may be 
well enough, provided the specialist is not making it the 
end of his intellectual life, provided he constantly 
realizes that the only valuable specialization lies in 
studying the general in the particular, and that the 
relating of an accurately determined particular to the 
general is the only thing which gives the results of 
specialized study their place and shows their size in 
the body of valuable knowledge. We are not object- 
ing to specialization — far from it, — but solely to the 
study of the unimportant. And this may take many 
forms. It may take the form of investigating some- 
thing which, when ascertained, is found to be a trifle. 
Or it may take the form of solemnly proving the ob- 
vious by an elaborate array of statistics, as when we 
are shown conclusively by tables of percentages, 
which have been tested and re-tested, that a given 
number of children born and bred in the city, com- 
pared with the same number born and bred in the 
country, show less knowledge of the different kinds 



of plants, grains, birds and beasts than do their rural 
compeers. Of the same nature is the proof 1 read 
recently, showing minutely and beyond the shadow 
of a doubt that in the domain of " child psychology " 
there was a marked distinction between the preferen- 
ces of young boys and girls for animal pets, more 
girls than boys preferring birds, and that unkindness 
or cruelty to an animal was from thirty to fifty per 
cent, more shocking to a girl than to a boy. Does 
one need to pursue higher university studies in order 
to know this? 

A force which is always operating to increase 
the perplexities of the situation is the mania for pub- 
lication. It is assumed that production of original 
results, published so all may have a chance to read 
and test them, is a necessary mark of the higher 
scholarship. Pressure is therefore constantly felt by 
the aspiring young candidate to justify himself in the 
eyes of other scholars in this way. Our embryo 
Doctors of Philosophy must write and print a disser- 
tation. This again is very well, if the man who is 
writing the dissertation has a sensible mind and is 
writing about something that needs to be made known. 
But what has come to pass? Another deluge! The 
number of reviews, scattered articles and contribu- 
tions of every sort in any one great subject, such as 
biology, or history, or chemistry, or classics, is so 
great that it is doubtful whether any human being 
can read in ten years the output in any one of these 
subjects for one year. The vast mass of publications 
is piling up unsifted, unorganized, and therefore un- 
available to a large extent for future use. It reminds 
us a little of what Carlyle said about the voluminous 
archives of the French Revolution: "The French 



Revolution consists of some tons of manuscript slowly 
rotting in the European libraries." 

The menace to our standards of knowledge of- 
fered by intemperate specialization is thus increased 
by a false notion as to what scholarly productivity is. 
It consists not only in the advancement of knowledge, 
but in the diffusion of knowledge, and, above all, it 
consists primarily in the advancement and diffusion of 
the more valuable knowledge. And, in passing, let 
us ask how anyone can fail to see that the question 
whether a certain body of knowledge is new or old 
has in itself nothing to do with the question of rela- 
tive values. Furthermore, in the forming of a great 
scholar by the close personal touch of his master 
there is a far nobler form of productivity than the 
writing of even an important dissertation. As a rule, 
the best "collected works" a scholar can leave is a 
group of great students. In the light of such con- 
siderations, is it not clear that the entirety of our 
standards of knowledge is being menaced? The pure 
white light is being broken into the many beams that 
compose it, and many there are who see not even so 
much as one whole color, but only some one hue of 
that color in the great spectrum. The clear organi- 
zation and evaluation of the knowledge we now have 
seems at the present time of more importance than 
all the stray advances hither and thither. 

Our standards of knowledge therefore need to 
be centered in the general body of ascertained truth. 
We must take our position, in the words of Francis 
Bacon, that "philosophy and universality are not 
idle studies," and we must carry this so far as to be- 
lieve that only in the light of the universal shall we 
understand the worth and bearing of the particular. 



And as the only available practical help towards 
securing this attitude of mind in our graduate stu- 
dents, we must insist on a clear and pure preliminary 
training in liberal college studies, followed by such a 
training in their graduate work as constantly keeps 
them in touch with the community of intellectual in- 
terests outside their special field of study. And to 
secure this in turn we should aim to secure as grad- 
uate students only men of strong, all-round ability, 
open vision and wide sympathies. In short we must, 
first of all, secure the right kind of man as a gradu- 
ate student. Having done this, we may rest assured 
that all other desirable results may be made to follow. 
2. When the harmonious standards of general 
knowledge are lost sight of, particular standards 
suited to one or another specialty are apt to take 
their place. Partly as a result of this, there comes a 
corresponding change in the standards of expression. 
When the broad view is lost, simplicity and universal- 
ity of statement, and a consequent attractiveness and 
beauty of presentation, are apt to suffer. It is not 
enough that a book or dissertation in the field of 
scholarship be accurate and painstaking, if it is to 
survive in the recollection of men. As we review in 
thought the books and papers which have made a 
mark on the intellectual life of any period, it is easy 
to see that many able contributions to knowledge have 
passed into oblivion because they were not engaging 
and readable, whereas one of the distinctive marks of 
the finest class of such compositions is their convin- 
cing charm of style. These are the classics of sci- 
ence and philosophy, as well as of literature. A 
scientific writer who has the artist's sense has thus 
an advantage over his equally able rival, and some- 



times over his abler rival, who lacks this sense. Now 
one of the most evident faults of the mass of special- 
ized publications which now occupy the main place 
in our literature of scholarship is a sort of solemn 
pedantry. This springs from the entire subordina- 
tion of the writer to his restricted theme, and to the 
particular technique of language which belongs to 
his specialty. He does not dominate his subject, 
but is mastered by it. He therefore writes too much 
in a dialect, and not in a literary way. He becomes 
dry and lifeless. Of course every subject and every 
subdivision of a subject has its own furniture of ideas 
and must make use of the technical words which 
alone set forth these ideas accurately. But this has 
been fearfully overdone. If it sufficed a Newton to 
define the elusive atom — whether rightly or wrongly 
is of no importance here — as " the least part of mat- 
ter, ought we not to take courage from his example 
and insist that technical terms, except when neces- 
sary, and highly formal language, and in fact all 
forms of swollen diction, be excluded from the schol- 
ar's writing. The difficulty of the ideas is sufficient 
without enveloping them in a fog of words. Let us 
somehow manage to keep the common store of pure 
English as the one treasury to which we resort for 
everything common English words can express. In 
this way alone shall we be able to preserve a general 
reading interest which will steadily connect the pub- 
lications in one department of knowledge with the 
publications in another. Descartes has said that 
clearness is a test of truth. Without going so far as 
to reverse this and to assert that obscurity of state- 
ment is evidence of error, we may at least use the 
maxim as a warning to all men who are prone to 
write in a formidable technical dialect. 



One other thing may be said in this connection : 
Pretentiousness of any sort is unscholarly, whether 
it be in the form of conceit as to the value of one's 
own thoughts or in the form of grave pedantry in 
proclaiming them to others. And, lastly, on this 
point it may be asserted that the man who is a slave 
to a technical terminology is in constant danger of 
getting away from the concrete truth of what he is 
studying into a region of artificial construction, 
where he is so much occupied with the scaffolding 
and outer appliances that he mistakes work on these 
for work on the real building. 

3. Back of all standards of knowledge and ex- 
pression in the scholar's life lie his standards of judg- 
ment. On these, more than on anything else, depend 
the genuineness and permanence of what he does. 
We may leave geniuses aside in this discussion, be- 
cause there is no use or need of legislation for them, 
and after all they are very few in number, supreme 
as their distinction is. And yet, even in the case of 
geniuses, we shall find more instances of sound com- 
mon sense than might be expected. But what of the 
mass of scholars? What is to be the ultimate guar- 
antee to mankind generally that their work is intrin- 
sically valuable, whether it be brilliant or plain, ex- 
tensive or limited, commanding or humble? Faraday 
somewhere writes that the education of the judgment 
is the chief benefit of a scientific training, and Hux- 
ley has told us that scientific ability in its last analy- 
sis is nothing less and nothing else than " trained 
common sense." How this throws us back on the 
personality of the man whom we are to encourage 
to be a graduate student ! It thus becomes primarily 
the question not of what he can know, how he can 

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express it, or how much he can do, but what kind of 
a man he is. The reasonings and conclusions of a 
vain man will be tinged with vanity. The judgments 
of a man " deep versed in books, but shallow in him- 
self," will not permanently appeal to the respect of 
his fellow men. The capricious or adventurous or 
self-advertising scholar is, so far forth, not a true 
scholar. The fate of our higher studies, in their 
effect on the men we influence, depends first of all 
on what kind of men we are. The kind of scholar 
any man is to become, so far as the abiding value of 
his influence goes, is determined in the last resort 
not so much by what he knows or says as by what 
he believes and loves. He must have the lover's in- 
stinct, almost the art of divination. Like the miner, 
he must have the eye that knows the ores of gold 
from fool's gold. The student who naturally longs 
to know the things of most worth, and searches for 
them in all simplicity and sincerity, and purposes to 
turn all to the best account by making his acquire- 
ments accessible and serviceable to his fellowmen, is 
the only kind of man who ought to be encouraged to 
enter our graduate schools. And this kind of man 
is most naturally bred in the comradeship of our col- 
lege life and in the atmosphere of liberal studies. 
What a mistake to fail in any way to make our grad- 
uate schools supremely attractive to just this sort of 
man. Given the personal qualities indicated and a 
suitable college training, and on top of this a life in 
graduate studies environed by the friendships that 
arise from the constant interchange of ideas between 
men studying in different departments of knowledge, 
how can the young scholar, so circumstanced, fail to 
develop that "trained common sense," that well- 

14 



poised judgment which must enlighten all his think- 
ing and all his doing if he is to be the scholar we are 
describing. 

It has often been debated whether the theoretical 
or the practical mind is the higher type. If the 
terms are used in their proper sense, it seems to me 
there can be only one answer: The practical mind is 
the better, because sound judgment, which is essen- 
tial to all sane scholarship, is an eminently practical 
thing. It is this that transforms knowledge into wis- 
dom. The brilliant theoretical scholar, without this 
balance, is structurally weak. But let us not misun- 
derstand what this practical mind is. It is not cut 
off from theory. In fact the highest practical schol- 
ars are those most deeply grounded in theoretical 
knowledge. But they differ from the merely theoreti- 
cal scholars in being able to use that knowledge 
steadily in applying it to the best advantage, and 
consequently the man who is a practical scholar in 
this sense is the only one who unites the best traits 
of the theoretical and practical mind. So when we 
see men of flighty judgment, erratic purposes, and 
unsteady effort, let us keep them out of our graduate 
schools as surely as we keep out the drone or ought 
to keep out the dullard. 

At this time, more than ever before, business and 
professional life, with their attractive careers and 
dazzling rewards, are taking most of the able men of 
the conntry. The attractions of the scholar's life 
are not relatively as great as they were a generation 
ago, nor is the honor paid to the scholar so great in 
our land as in the older civilizations of Great Britain, 
France and Germany, And yet on the little band of 
scholars in the liberal arts and sciences depends, more 

15 



than ever before, the tone of our nation in things in- 
tellectual and moral. We have already too many 
second-rate and third-rate and fourth-rate men among 
our scholars. We shall never be short of these. 
But on our graduate schools in the liberal studies 
rests the supreme privilege and duty of standing 
more resolutely than ever for the best standards of 
knowledge, expression and judgment, so that the 
small company of picked men who are best fitted by 
reason of their high manhood to become our best 
scholars will naturally resort to our graduate schools 
and lift them, and with them the higher American 
scholarship, to a level never attained before. And 
may we live to see that day ! 



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